A Senate Bill that would do away with the Department of Education, that’s what one Senator has proposed for Mississippi. Senator Angela Hill has submitted a bill that could potentially get rid of the Department of Education in Mississippi.
“There’s ways to manage the things that the Department of education manages without having that big bureaucracy,” said Senator Angela Hill. “There are definitely ways to streamline all of that.”
Senate Bill 2016 says that it would reduce the general fund appropriation to the state department of education and then transfer those funds to the teacher instructional materials fund for 2018. However, Hill says that she believes the entire department could be dissolved completely.
“You would have someone from each school district that would be responsible for looking at the new laws that would be passed on the state level and the federal level regarding education and then implementing those…” Hill said. “I have seen the communication get passed down to the schools that is actually not correct from some of the policies that they have passed down.”
Hill added that restructuring how the schools communicate with the legislature would be able to be simplified and only require some good management skills.
She said that there is no reason why they should not make things simple and cut out the middle man.
“We survived up until the 70s without a U.S. Department of Education and our schools were doing a lot better before we created that bureaucracy,” Hill said.
Hill addressed the failing school districts in the state saying that if the MDE were to be dissolved some of the school districts might benefit from a clean break and restart.
As the session continues, wording of the bill could change to include language that would eliminate the department of education altogether.
